Chapter 17
My feet trudge along the overgrown pathway, patches of foxglove and milkweed drooping toward my legs as Sophia and I wander back from Dawnmere’s class “field trip” to the edges of the Fickle Thicket.
We spent the morning studying rare herbs and flower petals, which Dawnmere thought might be soothing for the students who witnessed the wraith attack last night.
When we catch up with Elliot and Peter on our way to Crowley’s class, Peter’s calling Kitty, and Elliot’s brows are knit.
“What’s going on?” I ask.
Elliot shrugs. “Kitty missed our lecture this morning.”
Weird. It’s unlike Kitty to skip a class. “You get ahold of her?”
“Nope,” Peter says, pocketing the phone.
“Let’s go by her dorm before lunch,” Sophia says. “I bet she has a guy in there.”
Peter’s visible disgust makes us laugh as we hurry to Crowley’s class and take our seats.
Afterward, we make our way to Elkfore Hall. The dean sent out an email explaining that the wraiths were able to slip through a faulty gateway in Mortimer Tower that’s rarely used, and that seemed to be enough for most students and their parents.
Thankfully, nobody died, and the students who were taken to the infirmary are all in stable condition.
We’re grateful for pixie magic this morning.
I thought knowing Harker wasn’t deviant-proof would have been a bucket of ice water on most of the first years, but I get the sense they’re excited to finally be fighting real threats.
Once again I remember that they don’t have the experience I do. They don’t know how afraid to be.
“If she’s actually in bed with someone,” Peter says as he knocks on Kitty’s door, “this is going to be really awkward.”
Elliot leans against the wall. “I’ve walked in on Soph like five times.”
Peter’s face falls, as if the mental image pains him.
“She’s not your cousin,” I say.
Sophia snorts. “Basically, though.”
Peter’s fist slams against the door one more time before it swings open to reveal a narrow-faced girl, eyes wet and ringed with concern. I recognize her as the girl Kitty was having wine and popcorn with last night. Immediately my heart begins to thud.
“What’s wrong?” Peter’s voice is tight.
Her gaze darts from Peter to me to Sophia and Elliot behind us. “Our roommate…she left school.”
“Kitty?” Peter pushes past her into the room. It’s a triple, just as adorned with antiques and vintage wood as the others. Soft light spills across the desk where another girl, a ruddy-cheeked blonde, sits anxiously, piece of paper clutched in her hand.
“What do you mean left school?” Sophia asks.
The blonde hands the paper to Sophia. I watch her face as she reads what I can only assume is a letter from Kitty. Sophia’s eyes sweep across each line, worry carving her features. When she’s done, she hands the letter to Peter. “She dropped out.”
“No way,” Elliot says. “She was obsessed with this place.”
“Are her things gone?” I ask.
“All of them,” the blonde at the desk says, dejected. “She even took some of my shoes.”
“Do you think she hated us?” the first girl asks her roommate. “Why did you have to sleep with those weird videos playing?”
“I told you, it’s called ASMR!” the blonde says before storming from the room.
The first girl releases an exasperated noise. “I’m Mila. How do you guys know Kitty?”
“She’s my cousin,” Peter says, studying the letter. “Did you try calling her?”
“Only seventy times,” Mila says.
Peter nods. He couldn’t reach her, either. “When did you see her last?”
“Last night. We watched a movie in the commons.”
Kitty had invited me to join. I turn to Peter. “Did you talk to her after the wraith attack?” He’d said he was going to see if she was okay.
“She texted me saying she slept right through it.”
“That’s weird,” Mila muses. “She wasn’t here this morning. We both had a text from her saying she wasn’t feeling well and went to the infirmary. But we asked the pixies. They never saw her.”
“She was hightailing it out of here,” Sophia says somberly, looking over the note again. “Says so right in the letter.”
But the look on Peter’s face is one of suspicion, not sadness. “Guess so. Thanks, Mila.”
“Sorry we were such shitty roommates,” she says, sitting down on her patchwork quilt.
Peter’s mouth twists. “I’m sure it had nothing to do with you.”
Amid the hum of the dining hall lunch crowd, Peter says, “The letter’s got to be a fake.”
A bang sounds as a round-cheeked gnome pushes a cart of pots through ornate wooden doors. Peter lowers his voice. “She would never leave Harker. She’s wanted to attend school here her entire life.”
I’ve gotten the same impression from Kitty in the few weeks I’ve known her. “Is it her handwriting?”
“I don’t know,” he says, looking at the letter. “We only met this summer. I’d need one of her notebooks to compare, but…”
“She’s gone,” Sophia fills in. “Along with all of her things.”
“My notes from Lisette’s class—” I yank out my bag and rifle through binders and notebooks until I find our scribbled-over Stratification of Deviants sheet.
Sophia and Peter compare Kitty’s addition about harpies to her letter. Elliot finishes his bowl of fruit and then swipes Peter’s and digs in. When I frown at him, he shrugs good-naturedly. “He’s busy.”
“They’re different,” Peter decides.
Sophia’s lips twist, eyes still glued to Kitty’s looped o’s and slanted i’s. “They look the same to me.”
As if my body has become attuned to not only his demonic nature but also his evergreen-and-lemongrass scent, I spin just in time to see Reid brush behind us with an apple and a banged-up book and take a seat—alone—at a wide wooden table.
I have the errant thought that I hope I got all the wraith blood off me.
Last night I scrubbed every inch of my body until I’d scraped away any semblance of a summer tan and was back to being as pale as a ghoul myself.
At least now I’m a ghoul who smells like vanilla and rose.
Not that I care what I smell like to Reid.
“Maybe she was depressed,” I say to Peter quietly, just in case Reid’s eavesdropping.
“Sometimes people just drop out,” Elliot says. “Soph dropped out of high school.”
I cut my eyes to her. “You did?”
“Briefly.” She waves the question away. “It’s a long story. Let me check the lettering again.”
“I’m telling you, regardless of the handwriting, Kitty would never use the word bummed. She was an academic. She made fun of me for calling graphic novels novels.”
Sophia snorts. “In her defense…”
“I’m serious.”
“You sure you aren’t just butthurt?” Elliot says. “Your cousin was, like…your only friend here, right?” Sophia shoots Elliot a nasty look and he adds, “Until you met us. Obviously.”
“This isn’t my ego talking. Think about it—she ran the night of the wraith attack? She stole their shoes? Why?”
I think of my dorm. The two individual armoires…
and our shoes, tossed together, inside one closet.
“If someone were to try and make it look like she left the school, they’d have to take her things.
But if they didn’t know which shoes were hers, they might have accidentally taken some of her roommates’. ”
“You think someone took her?” Peter pales with the words. “Why?”
I don’t say that if Kitty was killed by a wraith, the school’s response to the attack would undoubtedly be different, or that she wasn’t even on our floor, and no wraiths were seen anywhere else on campus that night, meaning it’s more likely somebody used the commotion as a distraction to sneak her out than that a wraith got to her.
Instead I say, “I doubt they did. I’m just brainstorming. ”
Usually I’m inclined to follow logic. Penny once believed our apartment was haunted, and even though I spend most nights battling the creatures kids dress up as on Halloween, I just didn’t buy it.
Even when the cupboard clanked open on its own in the middle of the night or when we’d hear groaning in the abandoned apartment above us, I didn’t bat an eye.
It turned out we had a squatter in the building’s attic. Some poppy addict whose heavy footsteps shook our cabinets open. Penny was terribly relieved. I actually thought a ghost might’ve been preferable to the physical evidence of how bleak the STC living conditions were.
Kitty was a textbook overachiever and seemed prone to emotional outbursts.
It makes sense that she felt overwhelmed by the course load at Harker—we’ve only been here three weeks, and even I think twenty-four credits is a lot.
Still, I can’t shake the sinister feeling seeping into my bones.
“But we should look into it either way.”
“We will,” Sophia says. “Of course we will.”
“We’ll find her,” Elliot says.
Peter only stares down at his missing fruit bowl and nods.
“What a day,” Fiona says, taking her oversized glasses off to rub her temples as she perches her tiny butt on my desk. Her bare feet swing as she discards her heels. “The board is being just impossible about the committee for this year’s gala.”
I discreetly minimize two tabs on my computer: one of Kitty’s last social media post and another of a gossip site with a headline that reads Media Mogul Caspar Harlock Seen on Romantic Dinner Date with Mayoral Hopeful Beatrice Abbot.
“I wish I could offer some advice, but I thought the board was the committee, so…”
Fiona purses her lips at me. “You’re as difficult as your sister, you know that?”
“Gross. Don’t compare me to Nor.”
“Will you call her sometime? She says you haven’t been answering her lately.”
Now that she mentions it, I remember silencing a call from Nora during a particularly gruesome case study in Rituals and Exorcisms. I was late for Lisette’s class after, and I guess I never rang her back.
Normally I’m pretty good about that—my feeble attempt at pleasing the stony queen of type A older sisters.
“Speaking of,” Fiona says, eyes up from her phone and suddenly very focused on me. “Are you feeling better?”